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Class AA Boys

Photo by Kraig Lungstrom

The story of the season for the AA Boys this year has been the incredible and consistent team performance of US#7 Wayzata High school. Led by Junior Khalid Hussein, only once has Wayzata scored more than 33 points to win a meet this season, and that was when they scored 91 points en route to winning the soggy Roy Griak Invitational over 45 other teams from eleven states back on September 23rd. And the team is so deep, that when their JV squad competed as Varsity athletes in the Metro Invitational on September 17th, they scored 32 points and defeated runner-up Maple Grove, at the time ranked 3rd in the state, by 35 points. Dominating wins at the Lake Conference Championships and the Section 6AA meet have further solidified their status as the favorite to win the meet.

Sitting firmly behind Wayzata in the polls the whole season has been the team from Edina, led by senior Patrick Roos. Both teams have qualified for Nike Nationals each of the last three years, and while US#23 Edina has battled injuries and illness, they have done nothing to change the fact that they remain one of the nation's elite teams. The ever-competitive teams from Stillwater and Mounds View will both be in a strong battle for a podium finish, and an impressive Section performance from Maple Grove has put them firmly in that podium conversation as well. But Rosemount is not a team that can be discounted, as they also have had a long track record of success and have been getting hotter as the season wears on, scoring 55 points to win their section.  The youthful Sartell-St. Stephen, and the consistently-high finishing Bemidji also look to make strong impressions at State.

In the individual competition, Maple Grove's Alex Miley enters as the state's top-ranked athlete and undefeated thus far in 2016 while running Minnesota's fastest 5K time, but last year's seventh-place finisher faces stiff competition to upgrade his standing to a state title. Three other top-ten finishers return to challenge him in Hopkin's kicker Seth Eliason, Edina's Patrick Roos, and St. Paul Como Park's Innocent Murwanashyaka (who is also undefeated in 2016). Minnetonka's Watt Wilkinson and Wayzata's Khalid Hussein are also strongly in the mix as well, having both raced Roos and Eliason several times this year with several dramatic finishes. In fact, in the four races those four athletes have run against each other, every single one has ended with less than a second difference between the top two. Any one of these six runners could likely end up with a state championship, but they can't discount dark horses Collin Dwyer from Prior Lake or Reed Kurak from Centennial.